1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to assembling complex wire harnesses and, in particular, to an improved system, method, and apparatus for assembling wire harnesses with a connector light array designator.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many different industrial applications require the termination of large bundles or harnesses of wires into various types of connectors. In some applications, such as aircraft or automotive systems, each harness may contain more than 100 wires that must be routed and terminated in dozens of connectors throughout the assembly.
In the prior art, current wire/connector matching and termination methods begin by printing engineering data that displays the wire numbers and their related pin locations in the connector. A technician moves to the pre-selected wire harness, which may be remote or difficult to access, where he or she will perform the wire pinning operation. Such pinning operations typically comprise random selection of a wire from a harness of bundled wires. As shown in FIGS. 1 and 2, once the wire 21 has been identified by its label 23, the technician reads the engineering data 25 on the wire 21 to determine a pin location 27 on the connector 29 in which the wire 21 will be inserted. Once the pin location 27 on the connector 29 has been cross-referenced on engineering data 25, the task of locating the pin location 27 within the connector 29 must be done in order to insert the wire 21.
As illustrated in FIG. 3, this operation has a number of potentially high risk sources of error, including extremely small wire diameter, a large number of wires 21 per connector, close proximity of the wires in numerous harnesses 31, and limited work space 33, which creates awkward work positions. Thus, an improved system, method, and apparatus for matching harnesses of conductors with associated ones of apertures in connectors is needed.